Transfer center tech raises sales for Banner Health by $26.4 million
- Published | 04 March 2020
The health system reports that the number of referrals expanded by 16.5% last year, adding 3,308 more patients by February 2020, compared to the previous year.
Banner Health has its
headquarters in Arizona and is one of the country's largest public health
systems. The complex system operates in 28 acute-care hospitals and manages
them. It also has a Banner Health Network, an accountable care organization
(ACO) composed of doctors, hospitals, and local community care services. It
also operates Banner University Pharmacy, trained and working groups of
doctors, long-term care facilities, ambulatory surgery centers and a number of
other programs.
Banner Health maintains
about 70,000 referrals per year, including about 34,000 incoming patients from
hospitals and competitors in the region. However, moving volume growth since
2016 had tended to decline from 13.7% in 2018 to 2.4%. Staff observed this
rising amount of information and set out to find its causes and ways of
reversing the trend.
Charley Larsen, senior RN
manager at Banner Health Transfer Services said we noticed that transfers took
more than three hours–198 minutes–on average due to the lack of consistent
procedures and communication difficulties. This included multiple phone calls
between our physicians until the right physician provided the necessary
information to authorize the admission at the appropriate facility.
The referring physician
could have called a competitor during that prolonged waiting period, and
instead diverted a patient there, which Banner also discovered occurred.
Employees estimate that Banner lost 600 patients per month to rivals in 2018
due in part to slow transfer approvals and admissions, which created a
challenging process.
When Banner Health
participated with the Federal Emergency Management Association in a six hour
disaster preparedness exercise, the need for a streamlined, structured transfer
process was further driven home. Banner and other hospitals in the Phoenix area
have simulated their patients being evacuated to other facilities amid a
natural disaster.
Following extensive
research, the Chief Medical Officer Dr. Jason Brown and Larsen of Banner Health
Transfer Services co-wrote a 45-page white paper on the value of transfer
services and the multimillion-dollar financial impact of losing hundreds of
transfers from the Banner network.
An important element of the
project was to update Banner's infrastructure to a new transfer-center
solution. The legacy technology, apart from the lack of reporting capabilities,
was difficult to use and was not designed to support successful transfer center
operations.
Banner Health wanted to
implement the new transfer-center system as soon as possible due to the current
number and revenue losses of the patients. Despite its introduction during the
winter holiday season and the simultaneous launch of a separate EHR remote
hosting project, Banner Health was able to live with Central Logic in January
2019, a month earlier than normal for a comparable network of the size and
scope of Banner Health.
Our two transition center
teams use the approach, one for Arizona, and the other for Western Region
facilities. Banner Health started this program with 75 staff, but expanded to
over 400 over the year due to the significant rise in the number of patients,
but also due to our team members partnered with community hospitals and doctors
to educate them about our new capacities.
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